This paper examines the role of social connections on the career trajectory of Pakistani employees in local organisations. Scholarship (Syed,2016; Saher & Mayrhofer, 2014; Mangi et al., 2012; Saher, 2010;Chatterjee, 2007; Khilji, 2003; Budhwar, 2001; Lyon, 2000; Sparrow & Budhwar, 1997; Mendonca & Kanungo,1994) has already highlighted the significant impact of social connections on the professional growth of individuals in India and Pakistan. However, in response to the calls for contextualising HRM practices and research, this paper is developing a culturally specific framework to reveal pervasive practices of career progression in Pakistan. Qualitative research has been conducted to get in-depth data on the issue at hand. This paper will extend a rare insider's view and future research directions.

This paper focuses on exploring the way ingrained cultural wisdom and mechanisms provide the base for actualising official roles in formal organisations. Most of the formal interactions and transactions are made through personalised dealings (Qadeer, 1999). Some senior scholars feel that such cultural wisdom/mechanisms (like VB) are not relevant anymore (Chaudhary, 1999), but the current research and existing practices are giving a different picture of reality (Saher & Mayrhofer, 2014; Saher et al., 2014;
Qadeer, 1999). Considering this lacuna in literature and between literature and practice, this paper is going to unravel the process of informalization in formal organisations and will contribute to the ongoing debate on convergence divergence. This paper will also discuss the implications and extend guidance for future research in this field.

Russia under Vladimir Putin’s leadership has assumed a personalised character which has drastically transformed its domestic and defence policy as well as its global grand strategy. The main contour of the grand strategy is a strategic rebalancing in the places of its influence including its near abroad and its area of interest including Asia, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. Putin’s leadership and psychological orientation have a fundamental role in the materialisation of this transformation and the study of this factor serves as a lens to explain Russia’s resurgence and also provides a guide to Russia’s future foreign policy. One of the significant aspects of the strategic rebalancing is Russia’s increasing influence in South Asia and the projects of building transport and trade corridor. While China remains another significant powerful player with similar geostrategic and geoeconomic plans; states such as Pakistan foresee great challenges as well as opportunities which emerge as a result of the increasing influence of Russia and China in the region and the lingering dissonance in Pakistan’s relations with the United States of America.

This study examines the risk management solutions used in the banking sector to meet the many risks. The report also evaluates how  conventional and Islamic banks in Pakistan manage risk. This study used primary sources. First, senior managers, risk managers, and chief risk officers from Islamic and normal banks fill out a questionnaire. 51 financial institutions responded. Data analysis uses descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations, t-tests, an ANOVA, and the LSD test. Regular banks' operational risk management strategies and stress test results differ from Islamic banks statistically. The study found no statistically significant difference between Islamic and conventional banks in how well they used risk management tools and systems, how much
market risk VaR they used, how much credit risk exposure they had, how they reduced that risk, and how they analyzed their credit risk portfolios.

The present study was an attempt to understand how emotions are related to academic stress. Emotions are an integral part of a human’s life. The nature of this study was correlational. Students from Education department at the undergraduate university level were selected as a population from both public and private sector universities in Lahore, Pakistan. Questionaries were used to collect data. To explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and academic stress multiple regression analysis was applied. For comparison between two groups like gender independent sample t-test was used and for comparison between more than two groups like different age groups, one-way ANOVA was applied. The results revealed that students with higher EI suffer less academic stress than others as they are more cognizant of their emotions.

Online learning has transformed higher education. Many empirical studies have been done on the challenges with online courses, but few have presented an overview. We reviewed the literature using Cooper's framework. Concerns were found to be common in three large groups: online students, teachers, and people who make materials. Online education had problems because students had different ideas about what was expected of them, their level of preparedness, and their level of engagement. Teachers had to deal with problems like getting used to their new roles in the classroom and having trouble with time management and how to teach. Considerations for content development, the role of instructors in content creation, the use of multimedia in content, the importance of instructional methods, and more came up during this research. Higher education institutions can help both teachers and students get past these problems by giving them opportunities.

Apart from a few bibliometric studies of limited scope, the Pakistani scientific system is a scantly researched area requiring large-scale empirical evidence-based studies. This study aims to explore various features of collaboration in research and its impact on the performance of computer scientists in Pakistan. Over 15,494 SCOPUS-indexed publications in the area of computer science for the period 1997 to 2017, having at least one Pakistani author, were analyzed. The findings of the study disclosed the important role of collaboration in the citation count of the publications. International collaborative works and the more countries in collaboration significantly impacted the number of citations. The study's findings revealed that collaborative publications are more frequently cited and considered of high quality. This study is the first large-scale quantitative analysis of research collaboration, represented by co-authorship in computer science research in Pakistan.

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) have brought about a new medium for information sharing and communication and weblogs are becoming more and more popular in the virtual sphere. The process of code- switching can be traced in this fast evolving medium of communication. This paper aims at investigating the existence of code-switching patterns by examining the categories and frequency of Urdu code-switches in Pakistani English weblogs authored by Pakistani bloggers. The quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in this study. The blog entries of 10 Pakistani bloggers were analyzed by using the descriptive research paradigm. The findings illustrated that the linguistic choices of Pakistani bloggers as bilingual internet users are living in between two worlds, two cultures, and two languages which they employ in this mode of communication to fully express themselves. The findings showed the linguistic features that are particular to the context of CMC. The study concluded that the presence of code-switching in CMC have to be considered and treated as a unique and different entity from spoken form or written form of code-switching to capture its fundamental attributes.

This paper aims at building frequency profiles based on transitivity patterns of a small number of text corpora belonging to Pakistani English newspaper editorials. The profiles have been built by using UAM Corpus Tool (O’ Donnell, 2008) to explore transitivity features. The empirical analysis then has been compared with the frequency profiles of English language (Matthiessen, 2006 and Stubbs, 1996) to establish common features. The present work draws inspiration by Michael Halliday who is known as one of the pioneer corpus linguists since his early work on the Chinese language (Halliday 1956, cited in Halliday 1993). Mapping his (ibid) study on the BNC model he concluded that the relative frequencies of past and non-past are about 50-50 and the relative frequencies of positive and negative are about 9-1 (reported in Halliday 1993). Similarly, the present study looks closer to Standard English, and this is partially because the editorials are written by professional writers, and are well edited before printing.

The nuclear issue is considered to be one of the most important concerns in the Pak-US affairs since the 1970s. The issue further transpired after May 1998 when India conducted its second nuclear test, followed by Pakistan. Moreover, the US shared its critical concern over Pakistan’s nuclear programme since 1990. Afterwards, the US imposed sanctions on Pakistan to penalize the country and restrict the State of Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons. The Indian nuclear tests in May 1998 furthered the overall frustration in the U.S. administration which paved the way for taking some strong economic restrictions against India and Pakistan. It also became a concentrated challenge for the US to avoid any expected nuclear clash between Pakistan and India in the post-nuclear tests scenario. In this article, the US policy of nuclear non-proliferation toward Pakistan in the 1990s has been extensively examined in chronological order to set a proper score of literature for the researchers and academicians. Also, the study is conducted based on the secondary source of data, published interviews and a comparative analysis of US assistance to Pakistan in the 80s and 90s, to bring up the faded facts.